E-learning research: contributions for its incorporation into the university education

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to perform a meta analysis on the investigations, doctoral thesis, communications and speeches related to the students’ performance and other variables of e-learning formative actions in Geography and the Earth sciences at the university level.   This research was organized in three big phases: the card development (card evaluation, classification and analysis of documents); review and selection of the documents to be analysed; and the card application to the selected documents. Some of the conclusions of this paper are: a) not many documents related to the target subject; b) the analysed studies were merely short term investigations, few long term studies were conducted; c) there is not a predominant methodology applied to the investigation; d) questionnaires and interviews were the most used instruments to collect information.